Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Accept are Probably Less Correlated Than You Think

Jonathan Chapman, Mark Dean, Pietro Ortoleva, Erik Snowberg and Colin Camerer ()

No 23954, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: An enormous literature documents that willingness to pay (WTP) is less than willingness to accept (WTA) a monetary amount for an object, a phenomenon called the endowment effect. Using data from an incentivized survey of a representative sample of 3,000 U.S. adults, we add one (probably) surprising additional finding: WTA and WTP for a lottery are, at best, slightly correlated. Across all respondents, the correlation is slightly negative. A meta-study of published experiments with university students shows a correlation of around 0.15--0.2, consistent with the correlation in our data for high-IQ respondents. While poorly related to each other, WTA and WTP are closely related to different measures of risk aversion, and relatively stable across time. We show that the endowment effect is not related to individual-level measures of loss aversion, counter to Prospect Theory or Stochastic Reference Dependence.

JEL-codes: C80 D81 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
Note: AP EH LE LS ME PE POL
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Working Paper: Willingness-To-Pay and Willingness-To-Accept are Probably Less Correlated than You Think (2017)
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